With the advent of ever newer crowdsourcing services and mechanisms to develop altered standards of industrial and organizational structures, tasks are increasingly outsourced to the crowd, creating a completely new demand for interface functions between Crowd and Company.

Depending on the type of project, interface functions between the two should be a priority for both agencies and service providers, as well as enterprises (in the latter case, responsibility should initially fall on the Human Resources department).

In general, the service providers and crowdsourcing platforms themselves — of whatever kind, whether micro-tasks, creative or innovation — provide some degree support and advice, but often it’s not sufficient. A ‘Crowd Manager’ could help guide the crowd’s activity in the right direction.

This taxonomy is broad, covering the primary categories where crowdsourcing can be applied from a high, distant perspective. For the last six months, however, we have undertaken detailed research initiatives with a number of leading crowdsourcing providers as well performing our own research where we looked at over 2,500 crowdsourcing use cases. This has resulted in the development of our Enterprise Use Case Framework.

Carl Esposti, Founder of Crowdsourcing.org, interviews David Alan Grier, First VP IEEE Computer Society, and Associate Professor of International Science and Technology Policy at the George Washington University, where he also teaches a course on crowdsourcing. David is the author of When Computers Were Human. He discusses patterns evolving in Crowdsourcing, micro tasks, the parallel process of managing workers and delivering products and services to enterprise and his predictions for Crowdsourcing within a year.

In my last post Crowdsourcing Implications for Medium and Large Businesses, I looked at some of the other uses of crowdsourcing beyond the more targeted applications that are being readily adopted by home-office entrepreneurs and small businesses. These included examples in the areas of open-innovation and customer engagement. Another crowdsourcing opportunity relates to the selective out-tasking of highly repetitive, high volume work to a distributed online, on-demand workforce.

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Crowdsourcing.org, an initiative by massolution®

Founded in 2010, the industry website, Crowdsourcing.org, is a neutral organization dedicated solely
to crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As one of the most influential and credible authorities in the crowdsourcing space,
Crowdsourcing.org is recognized worldwide for its intellectual capital, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding
practice expertise and unbiased thought leadership.